Dozens of bills to be buried ahead of early election

With the Knesset expected to be dissolved next week ahead of early elections on January 22, 2013 dozens of bills will not become law, unless MKs propose similar legislation in the 19th Knesset.

One bill that made headlines recently is the proposal to extend Daylight Savings Time. DST was last dealt with in a Knesset Interior Committee meeting in late February of this year, which ended without any progress on two private bills and a ministerial bill on the matter. MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), who proposed one of the private bills, and Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s associates have placed the blame on each other. Horowitz says Yishai wants to keep DST short for religious reasons, while those close to Yishai say the bill has been stuck since February for technical reasons. Yishai planned to pass the bill in the Knesset's winter session, but as it is not scheduled for a vote next week, he won't be able to.

Another bill that has been stuck for months and is a target of Shas-Meretz bickering is reforms to the Planning and Construction Law. In February, Knesset Interior Committee chairman Amnon Cohen (Shas) finished two years of work on preparing the legislation, which is 200 pages and 600 articles long. Horowitz has complained that the bill does not give enough attention to environmental considerations, and wrote to Yinon in February that MKs were not given enough time to review the legislation before it is brought to a vote in the committee.